It was last summer, when I had finished proof-reading my book, Non-Attic Greek Vase Inscriptions, that I started to think more carefully whether I should now throw myself into the Attic evidence. One thing gave me a slight headache, of course, and that was the enormous bulk of material I was facing. I guessed the overall number to be around 4000, whereas the non-Attic material had come up to around 400. After checking my notes that had assembled in the course of time, the few publications in which I had dealt with Attic vases, as for instance the article on the François Vase (Mus. Helv. 48), as well as the relevant sections in NAGVI, the most important thing to do was to contact the man who had been dealing with Attic vase inscriptions for decades, that is Henry Immerwahr at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. As you will know, he presented his project, Corpus of Attic Vase Inscriptions (CAVI) nearly 35 years ago, when he had already been working on it for twenty years, and in 1990 he published his book, Attic Script. A Survey. In this book, vase inscriptions play an important role, yet 'only' around a thousand numbers are included, and for many of them no edition of the text is given. Moreover, Immerwahr's main focus lies on writing as a social-historical phenomenon of the Athenian population, whereas he does not aim at a complete analysis of the documents with all their implications and is not primarily interested in language. Nevertheless, if I am not mistaken, he is the only scholar in our days who really focuses on the inscriptions when dealing with Attic vases, and who considers them as the centre of his interest.
Even more fruitful is, in my opinion, an approach which combines all aspects of form and content. When I say 'form' I mean the linguistic analysis, but one which not only considers aspects of script, spelling, phonology, morphology or the like, but is also interested in literary language, dialect and sociolect, proper names, 'true' and popular etymology, and compares each inscription with all the others on vases by the same painter. And with 'content' I mean that the linguistic approach must always regard the inscriptions within their context of production and of use, and carefully consider the figured decoration, which touches so many aspects of Greek life, such as myth, religion, festival, symposion, and love. With such an extended view many new and surprising insights may result, even from documents that have been known for a long time. Last, not least, it is important not to shrink from visiting the museums and checking the originals, for there is one thing I have learnt when doing research on non-Attic vase inscriptions: never trust that a published reading of a vase inscription is necessarily correct. (Of course it's not always wrong either!)
With these things in mind I sent an e-mail to Immerwahr last July, introduced myself, told him about my book, which would be published soon, as well as about my plans - and hesitations - to start on the Attic material, and asked him about the status quo of his collection. The answer arrived a few days later. He said he was 85 and would be glad if some younger people would deal with the Attic vase inscriptions. Only a few weeks before he had sent a final Ibycus version to Cornell University where it is going to be processed for inclusion in a CD-ROM of the Packard Humanities Institute. So maybe we will be soon able to buy the whole corpus in a handy and searchable format. Also there are a few hard copies of a slightly earlier version placed in various institutions in America and Europe.
As I do not have the equipment to read Ibycus format, Immerwahr sent me a spare set of Macintosh floppies with that earlier version, which contains more or less the same material but in a less homogeneous form. The whole corpus in that version consists of about 7.5 MB text in Microsoft Word documents, or about 2000 pages, and a total number of 8173 vase entries. The structure of the entries is the same throughout. For each vase, after the local number, there is the collection and the inventory number, followed by a section A with the type of vase, find place if known, painter or potter or both, date, and bibliography. In a section B a short description of the paintings is given. Section C contains the inscriptions, section D free commentary, and at the end there are often footnotes. No illustrations are provided.
In the last few months and weeks it has become clear to me that the whole collection may be improved considerably if one could check as many inscriptions as possible on the original vases. For it is a fact that they only rarely show in a satisfactory way in published photographs, and therefore some rather dubious readings have been transmitted for years or decades. Of course, checking vases in dozens of museums all over the world will be an extremely laborious and time-consuming effort. Yet it will be basic research in the truest sense, and I have the strong impression that with this procedure the steps forward will be numerous and partly, I hope, important.
As I have just spent one academic year at Heidelberg, I have taken the opportunity to visit the vase collection of the University, which is in the same building as the Classics Institute where I was teaching. What I did was to check the relevant section in Immerwahr's Corpus against the vases and fragments in the actual collection, check the readings of the inscriptions against the texts in Immerwahr and the publications he draws upon, and take photos of every single piece with my digital camera. The result was quite promising: (1) I have now a collection of very good pictures of the vase inscriptions in the collection, pictures which really show the inscriptions, quite unlike the published ones. (2) I found that there are 84 vases and fragments with inscriptions in the collection, whereas Immerwahr's corpus contains 55. (3) By looking carefully at the originals, I could considerably improve the readings of 5 inscriptions, for another two I still hope to find a better solution as the old readings are impossible, and for a number of inscriptions slight changes to the received transcription have shown to be necessary.
The most important part of the new project, AVI, will be the photos. For if I have just said that we should never trust a published reading of a vase inscription, this also applies to my own readings, of course. So it is crucial to provide objective means to put any scholar in the state of checking him- or herself any reading I consider to be correct. Thus I am planning a ever-growing database of verified CAVI entries including a choice of significant photos. This will gradually be published on the Internet.
Apart from providing the raw material to the scientific community, I am planning to do quite some analytical work on particular questions. This, as well as contributions by my future collaborators, will be published partly in electronical form, partly on paper, and will be accounted for on the project homepage.
Rudolf Wachter
First published 24 September 2004.
Last update 2018-03-08